I suspect, without identifying someone here who will take the other side, you won’t get much engagement on this topic. “copies of self” is a common setup in a lot of thought experiments, but it’s not currently possible, so there’s no way to resolve what it actually feels like, and what parts of past continuity or expected future continuity are important for what aspects of identity.
Sure there is. Feelings, at least in a typical materialist worldview with an information theoretical theory of identity, are simply cognitive patterns that exist independently in the several approximate copies. The copies, being similar, will ipso facto have similar feelings. That’s all there is to it.
When you stipulate uncertainty about this matter, you are unknowingly invoking some kind of soul-intuition. That’s the whole point I’m getting at. By “feelings”, you are clearly not merely referencing the cognitive patterns of each individual clone as they occur independently in the separate clones. If you were, there would be no mystery about it; nothing to resolve.
Edit: Also, even without running the experiment, it should still be possible to operationalise and to examine what conclusions could be inferred from which experimental results and which experimental results seem more likely. Right now, you seem to be basically blackboxing the whole issue.
I suspect, without identifying someone here who will take the other side, you won’t get much engagement on this topic. “copies of self” is a common setup in a lot of thought experiments, but it’s not currently possible, so there’s no way to resolve what it actually feels like, and what parts of past continuity or expected future continuity are important for what aspects of identity.
Sure there is. Feelings, at least in a typical materialist worldview with an information theoretical theory of identity, are simply cognitive patterns that exist independently in the several approximate copies. The copies, being similar, will ipso facto have similar feelings. That’s all there is to it.
When you stipulate uncertainty about this matter, you are unknowingly invoking some kind of soul-intuition. That’s the whole point I’m getting at. By “feelings”, you are clearly not merely referencing the cognitive patterns of each individual clone as they occur independently in the separate clones. If you were, there would be no mystery about it; nothing to resolve.
Edit: Also, even without running the experiment, it should still be possible to operationalise and to examine what conclusions could be inferred from which experimental results and which experimental results seem more likely. Right now, you seem to be basically blackboxing the whole issue.